44. the graveyard shift
Can't remember how this came about. I have a feeling Nightshift suggested it first.
Both bands were booked to play at a big bash a month after the Song Contest. And there were other dates before that. But Nightshift wanted to fit in an extra gig, and we were up for that. So we had a meeting.
*
It was probably the only time I visited Merton College. It's tucked away with Oriel and Corpus Christi, all three small and old.
The meeting was in someone's room, presumably one of the two prominent members of Nightshift, who were both there, the bass player and frontman. Not sure if anyone came with me, though I think it may have been Bill: we went to a similar meeting later that term.
It's possible Nightshift suggested a joint gig and I mentioned the Cape of Good Hope - though how anyone arrived at a combined fee of £45 is another thing I can't remember. At 70p a ticket, the pub needed an audience of 65 to break even, and I'm not sure they got that. It was a thursday, not the ideal party night before exams. Still, the arrangement suited both bands.
An advert appeared in Daily Information, the university events calendar, calling this a Bawl of a time - and a poster was printed, in a similar vein. A deliberately crude piece of work, handwritten words in black on a pink background, including the Banned Band nonsense, a disco called Bedtime Bop, and a bar open till two in the morning, very unusual at the time.
The illustration was a rough drawing of a man in an old-fashioned night shirt and nightcap. He's holding a candle, one of his socks is darned, and his ankles are hairy. Yet another of the band posters I cut up to fit a piece in an album. Regrettable vandalism. Matched by the mistake I made in the lead-up to the gig.
I had an attack of hubris.
Who was going to go on first?
Because we'd won the Song Contest, I thought we should top the bill. I didn't use those words, sounding like I thought Nightshift were our support band, but I have a terrible feeling I gave that impression...
I'm pretty sure they didn't think much of us. They fancied themselves as better musicians, and I wasn't about to argue - and they probably couldn't believe that a band who'd won a competition played nothing but covers. That night, our first ten numbers were Rolling Stones songs!
Anyway, Nightshift agreed to go on stage first - which meant I fucked us up. Of course, they brought their own fans - and some of them dispersed when they finished their set. Our people had already seen us at the Cape, and there weren't many left when we went on.
So this was another of our not-great nights. But you live and learn; there were bigger gigs coming up; and this one was memorable for a number of things.
*
For a start, we nearly didn't play at all.
We're setting up after Nightshift when Bernie comes over and proceeds to explain in intimate detail, which goes over my head, that we're missing some electrical component or other. Without it, to use the technical engineering term, we're royally fucked.
Oh we'll be alright, I said. You'll fix it. He was good with things electric.
Let me spell it out, he goes, the Yorkshire accent thickening whenever he had to explain matters to a southern imbecile.
Without that item, he says, electricity will not pass through our equipment. Without electricity, we cannot play electric guitars or hear your voice through an electrified microphone (though that is a silver lining). Do you grasp the problem?
Of course.
Slight pause.
But it's fine. You'll fix it.
No. I. Will. Not. Without electricity, I can't even begin - right, I'll fix it.
And he went away and did. I knew fuck-all about electricity, so there was nothing I could do to help, but someone always sorted that kind of thing. If they hadn't, we were all very laid back about it. We liked being in this band, but it wasn't life or death. If we hadn't played the Cape that night, we'd have laughed it off over the years.
*
But we did play on friday 27 May 1977. And even though we didn't go down too well in that half-empty upstairs room (again), I relished a couple of solutions we came up with, some proper musical thinking. You'd expect that from Bernie, but me...?
The original studio version of Sympathy for the Devil has congas and maracas. Only the Stones could make those work in a driving rock song, as well as sitar (Paint it black, Street Fighting Man) and acoustic guitars (Jumpin' Jack Flash, Street Fighting Man again).
We tried maracas ourselves, but you look a bit of a berk shaking away when no-one can hear them, so I had a think. Meanwhile Bernie put his mind to an alternative for bongos.
On a bass guitar, the strings are relatively thick and relatively loose, so they vibrate longer and produce that deeper sound. But at the back of the guitar, the other side of the bridge, they're pulled tighter. By hitting that short tight area with his fingers, Bernie produced a sound like metallic bongos. Bass guitarists are there for the rhythm as well as the depth of sound, so he had no problem tapping those strings in time to the samba beat. Worked really well. Punky and clever. Audiences enjoyed watching his innovation. I know because people told us.
This was in the great musical tradition of improvising.
I saw a documentary on Buddy Holly once. In the studio one day, the other side of the glass, he asks his drummer what the hell he's doing.
Nuthin'. I ain't doin' a thing.
I can hear you. What is that?
When drummers say they're not doing anything, it means they're drumming without knowing it. They're forever tapping things. I watched Bill do it with a pair of pens. Buddy Holly's drummer, Jerry Allison, was beating out a rhythm by slapping his thighs. Buddy kept the exact sound on Everyday, while Not Fade Away has Allison hitting a cardboard box. On Peggy Sue, the drums sound unusual because the echo chamber is switched on and off. Makes Holly's early death even worse, because you can only imagine what he and Norman Petty would've come up with over the years.
When the dreaded McCartney recorded a track at Ginger Baker's studio in Nigeria, Baker provided percussion by shaking a tin filled with gravel. Charlie Watts hits a dustbin on the Voodoo Lounge album.
Bernie's brother also played bass, in a 1950s skiffle band. It featured Graham Skinner, 'the fabulous scout drummer', whose bass drum was an old metal petrol can.
But I didn't know any of these examples still years later. To me, Bernard Cook wasn't maintaining a family tradition, he was inventing something. Amazingly, so was I.
*
As I say, Bernie reminded me that I got a decision right in my life. Just the one, but they don't come much bigger. I never took up smoking.
I did try it once, like everyone else. Fifteen years old with two Embassy Tipped nicked from my dad's packet of twenty. Box of matches in my bedroom, no-one else in the house. I had a couple of drags, thought there was nothing to it, then remembered you were supposed ot inhale.
While Robin was away in Australia, I sometimes went round to his parents for dinner, or lunch with just his dad, an american war hero and writer. One day, we're waiting for the spaghetti to cook when a cloud of smoke billows into the sitting toom. The kitchen's on fire.
Except it isn't. The smoke had come in from across a sidestreet. The fire was in an upper floor of the C&A on the corner. Now, the smoke had to cross that street, but imagine this: it was still strong enough to make us rush out of the flat, shut the door behind us, and cough our chests out in the corridor. In a fire, you die of smoke inhalation, not burns. It can take only ninety seconds. I believed it that day. We couldn't breathe at all.
Exactly the same when I tried that first fag. Coughed like I was dying, did it again, then gave up smoking faster than anyone who ever lived. If I meant I wouldn't be cool at school, fuck that. With my asthma, it would've been disastrous. I didn't envy those cool kids their lungs in later life.
At the boarding school I was sent to, quite a number of kids smoked in the sixth form, so the common rooms stank of the stuff. But I didn't notice till I went back for an old boys' match. After a year in generally smoke-free environments, just one breath in the common room left me coughing.
But in the time I was at the school, there was so much smoke in the air that you didn't notice it. Sounds unlikely, but it's true of the whole country. It was only years later, when they started banning smoking from most public places, that you could smell smoke on your clothes when you came out of a pub.
Even I was tempted at school. I didn't touch cigarettes again, but I quite fancied trying a pipe. Not exactly glamorous (our prime minister had one), but I thought the pipe was a clever invention, the airways bringing smoke into your mouth while keeping the fire going. And tobacco was dirt cheap in those days, which is why so many died of it. Even the posh Balkan Sobranie I bought.
It came in a round tin which was silvery white, with an illustration of two country women in traditional dress. I think one of them had a cigar in her hand. I chose this brand instead of british varieties because the tobacco smelled so good. It looked like moist dried figs and had a sweet smell. Till you stuck it in a pipe and smoked the fucking thing. Then it became tobacco like any other and I stopped before long.
What did my dad do when I said I'd started smoking a pipe? Him with twenty years smoking behind him and his health already affected (it killed him at 70). Did he tell his eldest son not to even start this stupid deadly habit? No, he bought me a lighter! Being on the camp side of gay, he found a cheap flashy gold one. Lighters aren't much good with a pipe, another reason to stop this silliness.
I hung on to the tin, though.
No idea what I kept it in. It was three inches in diameter and only a couple of centimetres deep. But ideal as a replacement maraca.
I bought some tin tacks. Not drawing pins, with those coloured plastic tops. The tops of these were circular too, but all metal. Put some of these in a small tobacco tin and you made a noise by shaking it.
Even a musical illiterate like me knew that the sound depended on the number of tacks. Half-fill the tin and they've got room to move, so they clatter around and you can't control the rhythm. Fill it almost full and you get a shushing sound, much more like a maraca. I experimented, arrived at an ideal number of tacks, then wrapped the tin in black duct tape, so it looked as punky as it sounded. It fitted neatly into the palm of a hand, and there's real attitude in playing a maraca by shaking your fist!
Shake it close to a microphone and you could hear it. When I did that in rehearsals, the others winced at the infernal racket but liked it too. It went well with Bernie's bass bongo and I was inordinately proud of coming up with the idea. Ginger Baker would've approved. Very smart, you cunt. Just cut out the shit vocals.
*
bill and coo
Not everyone disappeared when we finished our set. I look round and see Bill Drysdale talking to two girls.
Nothing surprising about that. He was a good-looking hunk. I carried on packing away my mike and stand. When I finished, the girls were still there.
They're chatty and smiley and I envy our drummer. But I notice his body language is different from theirs. Leaning back a fraction, bit like a stag at bay! So I don't think I'll be cramping his style by walking over...
They're both good-looking students, especially the one with short blond hair in cream dungarees (fashionable at the time). She reminds me very slightly of my star girlfriend in year one. Now wouldn't that be a great way to bookend my time at Oxford...
Yeh, right.
I saunter over and introduce myself as the singer. But they already know that - and it cuts no ice. They tell me they'd both been thinking of answering our ad for backing vocalists (so Pat and Harry nearly hit the jackpot!), and I tell them there's still time: we could use some!
But the self-deprecation doesn't work. I'm clearly in the way here, so I'm about to leave - when they go first! Drifting away at unflattering speed.
I'd apologise to Bill, except I know he's quite relieved.
Yeh, my heart stood still
Yeh, his name was Bill
And, when he walked me home
Da doo ron ron ron, Da doo ron ron
Far as I know, he didn't walk either of them anywhere. I tell him I'm amazed he didn't grasp the opportunity, but he says he's not keen on girls who make the moves! He was younger than us, remember. He laughed when I shook my head.
In his second and third years at college, I wonder if he discovered they're the kind of girls you do want to know. A week or so later, I was approached by a First Lady on the street. You win some.